↖CV
Plastic Stars, Tara Downs, New York, US
Héloïse Chassepot, Violet Dennison, Ivy Haldeman, Charlotte Houette, Kelsey Isaacs, Priscilla Jeong, Hilda Kortei, Evian Wenyi Zhang
June 23/July 28
Tara Downs is pleased to present Plastic Stars, a group exhibition broadly surveying the practices of an international set of female-identifying artists. These artists, mostly working in painting, are catalyzed by the structural parameters inherent to the medium – the grid, the picture-window, the canvas itself – and are attuned to their works’ potential afterlives, their potential to generate afterimages. More plainly, they evince, over and over, an acute awareness of the conditions of production and circulation intrinsic to contemporary art today. As such, the works on view bring the external strategies and processes of photography, sculpture, and textile fabrication to bear on the historical trajectory of painting. They buoyantly replicate adolescent forms of patterning and appliqué – resonant with vinyl decals, school binder adornments, and, indeed, the plastic stars adhered to the suburban bedroom ceiling – sometimes cannibalizing scraps of past works, or elsewhere rendering the recursive effects of photography in oil and acrylic. Collectively, these exuberant works function en abyme, often constellating correspondences among formalist operations, the mechanics of image production, and the teenage imaginary into an ecstatic affective network.